CHAPTER NINE
Back in New York, Yates became one of the earliest trial patients of Dr. Nathan S. Kline, a man soon to become world renowned for his work in psychopharmacology. According to his New York Times obituary, Kline “revolutionalized the treatment of mental illness” by introducing the use of tranquilizers, antidepressants, and antipsychotic drugs that enabled people to lead productive lives as outpatients—people who would have been considered hopelessly insane just a few years before. Kline was thus instrumental in reducing the stigma of mental illness among a generation that continued to view it as a kind of moral weakness. “The fact that a condition is treated with medication,” he said, “somehow guarantees in the public mind that it is a genuine illness.”
Yates was delighted to learn that he suffered from something so explicable as a “chemical imbalance,” which modern science had the means to redress. No more “Sigmund fucking Freud” for him; all he had to do now was report to Kline’s office on West Sixty-ninth every month or so, answer a few simple questions, and be on his way with a fresh supply of “crazy pills” as he called them. And while many creative people who suffer from mental illness (particularly manic-depressives) deplore the effects of psychotropic drugs and try to do without them, this was never the case with Yates. For an absentminded man, and a writer at that, he was remarkably diligent about taking his pills according to schedule, then coping as best he could with the slight mental dullness (and tremor and dry mouth and frequent urination) that followed. By 1974 Yates was taking as many as three different psychotropics a day, in addition to lithium.
But he wouldn’t stop drinking. It was the one great caveat that every psychiatrist beginning with Kline tried futilely to enforce: Do not mix these drugs with alcohol. At first Yates was wary, but once he learned that no immediate calamity followed, he drank as much as ever—more, perhaps, now that his writing came harder. It was the one reliable pleasure that awaited him after a frustrating day, and most of the time he felt entitled. “He loved the idea that he was mentally ill,” said his daughter Monica, “and hated the idea he was an alcoholic”—that is, bipolar disorder was a bona fide illness, while alcoholism smacked of a shameful personal failing. As he saw it, he drank because he liked to, and no matter what the doctors said, he refused to concede that alcohol made his illness all but impossible to treat. Again and again he was told that even moderate drinking is ill advised when taking lithium, not to mention the other tranquilizers and anti-psychotics he sampled over the years: Such drugs compound the sedative effect of alcohol, and drinkers tend to urinate the drugs out of their system and hence render them ineffective. Needless to say, too, a drunk is less likely to take his medication as prescribed, particularly if his alcoholism is so advanced that blackouts and seizures become common. “This is what keeps your old daddy in business!” he cheerfully told a friend, dumping a handful of pills into his mouth and washing them down with a slug of bourbon.
For the time being, though, things were looking up. Paul Cubeta, the assistant director of Bread Loaf, visited Yates a month after the conference and was relieved to find him completely recovered and quite confident of staying that way. He had Guggenheim money in the bank and a bit left over from Hollywood, and soon he’d be richer than he ever thought possible: Frankenheimer had assured him that United Artists’ reaction to his screenplay was “excellent”; production had yet to be definitely scheduled, and cuts would have to be made, but it seemed only a matter of time now. Meanwhile Yates was covering his bases. He continued to teach at the New School, albeit a bit more lackadaisically than before, and his old friend Verlin Cassill was “ninety-eight per cent sure” he could get Yates a better-paying job at the Iowa Workshop should the need arise.
“It hardly ever happened and it wouldn’t last long,” the novel Uncertain Times begins, “but William Grove felt almost at peace with the world when the new year of 1963 broke over New York.”* This was true for Yates, too, and as a final coup before his life went off the rails again, he was chosen one of the “Ten Americans to Watch in 1963” by Pageant magazine. Each of these ten, the happy few, had briefly transcended the anonymity of life in the vast republic; each stood to become a dominant force in his or her field of endeavor: e.g., Romaldo Giurgola (architecture), Robert A. Good (medicine), Maxine Smith (race relations), George Grizzard (entertainment), and Richard Yates (literature)—the last of whom mentioned his humble beginnings as a copyboy for the New York Sunand remarked that “young writers are not necessarily ruined by Hollywood.”
Not ruined, perhaps, but often disappointed. At the beginning of March, right around the time Yates had hoped to be schmoozing with Natalie Wood (since his contract required that he report to the set), he got bad news from a “hesitant and old”–sounding Monica McCall: There would be no movie. As Yates explained it two years later,
Miss Wood’s agent decided that it might Tarnish Her Image with the Teenagers if she appeared as a girl who loved her Daddy a little too much—and Blooey. She pulled out, then [Henry] Fonda pulled out, then United Artists pulled out, then John Frankenheimer (the Dedicated Young Director) pulled out—and the whole God damned deal fell through—leaving me with a fraction of the earnings I was supposed to reap. I had been counting on sending both my children through college on the money I’d been promised, so when the axe fell it was something of a blow.… That, I guess, is show biz.
He called Styron to commiserate, and a couple weeks later the wealthy, undismayed author wrote a consoling note to Yates: “Frankenheimer’s mills, while grinding exceeding slow, seem to be grinding sure. What I mean is that he has just paid me a substantial amount of money in order to extend the option on Lie Down in Darkness. This seems to indicate that … he is eventually going to do it.” Alas, no, though the property would be kicked around Hollywood for many years, occasionally shimmering into view like a saving mirage in times of terrible need. As for Frankenheimer—whom Yates had come to consider something of a friend—he soon fell out of touch forever. “I always wondered why better things hadn’t happened to Dick,” the director mused. “He was such a great writer.”
* * *
Yates’s progress on his novel seemed thwarted by ambivalence toward his material, not to say a lack of clarity. When he first returned to New York that fall, he tried to capitalize on his “Builders” success by writing another short story, but it soon went cold—so cold, in fact, that he came to believe he’d lost his knack for short fiction entirely; some fifteen years would pass before he managed the trick again. So he went back to his war novel, or coming-of-age novel, or whatever it was apart from a journalistic, unformed account of his own experiences as a feckless private who’d played a nonheroic (as opposed to unheroic or even antiheroic) role in the mop-up action after the Bulge. He asked friends to suggest poems that dealt with “the trials of adolescence”—perhaps he’d find some sort of thematic focus there. Meanwhile he just kept writing: “I’m working hard as hell on a new novel in the hope of finishing it by the end of the year,” he wrote Cassill in early February; “don’t know if it’s any good or not, but the pages keep coming.”
Then they stopped coming—just like that—though the rest of his routine remained intact: Each morning he’d put on the same sweatshirt and corduroy pants, take his pills, make coffee, light cigarettes end on end, and stare at the wall. Then lunch and a long walk, the hopeful suspense as he hurried back to his desk, and another afternoon of nothing. Sometimes, in an agony of caffeinated frustration, Yates would force himself into a “spasm of writing”—then reread the pages and throw them away: “All the sentences were weak and lame and even the handwriting looked funny.”
Soon Yates was drinking heavily again and wondering whether he’d ever write another page of decent fiction, even as the world continued to honor him. In May, the National Institute of Arts and Letters awarded $2,500 grants to a handful of the most promising young writers in the country, including Yates, William Gaddis, Joseph Heller, William Humphrey, and Peter Matthiessen. An oppressively eminent crowd attended the ceremony at the Academy of Arts and Letters in Upper Manhattan, where an outdoor luncheon was held under a large tent in the courtyard. There was little question of Yates’s enduring such an affair soberly, and by the time he and his fellow honorees were herded into the first two rows of the auditorium, he was vividly impaired. Bob Parker watched from the audience as his friend, summoned at last to the dais, “lumbered like Frankenstein” across the stage: “Dick was wearing a tan gabardine suit, the top button buttoned to the bottom hole, his necktie awry—a cartoon of a drunk. He was barely able to say ‘thank you.’”
It didn’t help that Yates’s latest girlfriend was herself an unstable alcoholic, though perhaps a person of more sober habit would have been out of her depth. Craige* was an Irishwoman in her late twenties who worked as a copy editor for a fashion magazine; mordantly witty when coherent, she became (in Grace Schulman’s words) “very sick and disturbed” when drunk. She had a way of falling down in public, and in a stupor would sometimes mistake Yates for her father or brother, with all that suggested of an unsavory subtext. And though she was still rather young and pretty, dissipation had already taken a toll: “Even then she had something of the Blanche DuBois agedness about her,” Schulman recalled. Indeed, Yates’s description of her in Uncertain Times—where she appears as “Nora Harrigan”—bears this out in rather pitiless terms: “She seemed to be letting her appearance go in subtle, telling ways: something a little bedraggled about the hair, something flaccid in the lips, a generally unwholesome pallor in the face and neck.” Yates even pointed to the character’s “toe jam”—the result of being too hung over to wash her feet in the shower.
Such a couple couldn’t easily accommodate another lost soul, but when Yates learned the full extent of his sister’s predicament he was willing, at least, to take her in. For years he’d been talking about “poor Ruth”—married to such a vulgar oaf, stuck out in “Ass Hole, Long Island” with nothing to do, her looks gone and drinking too much to boot. But he had no idea how bad things had become. By 1963 Ruth was a chronic alcoholic with an enlarged liver, and her husband beat her on a regular basis. “For years we’d hear the beatings,” her oldest son recalled. “The shouting and scrambling around downstairs. Finally, when I was seventeen, I walked in on them. They were both surprised. My father had always hit his children, but this time I was determined to stop him. I shoved him in a chair and held him there.” Both Ruth and her husband drank—it had always been part of the family culture—but since the late fifties Ruth’s drinking had grown steadily out of control. Fred wanted things and people to proceed according to custom (“He was God Almighty,” said his son), and it enraged him to come home for the cocktail hour and find his wife already incapacitated. Usually the argument that followed was limited to screaming and weeping, and would end with Ruth tottering upstairs to pass out; but if Fred was in a particularly nasty mood, or a sufficient number of weeks had passed since the last time, he’d beat her. For years Ruth had claimed that she stayed in the marriage “for the children,” and then as the children grew up and moved out—and were themselves urging her to leave their brutal father—she’d say it was “[her] problem” and she’d “work it out.” Finally it got so bad that she turned to the only person she knew who might be able to help: her brother.
Yates was shocked and furious. He called Sheila—the only person in his life who knew Ruth—and asked her advice: “Dick thought he might go out there and confront Fred,” Sheila recalled, “because Ruth was too much of a cipher to stand up for herself. I thought his quixotic ideas were ridiculous, though I was sorry for Ruth. He was considering all options: take her in, confront her husband, whatever.” Finally Yates offered his sister a place to stay, but by then the crisis had passed: She couldn’t bring herself to leave Fred after all. Her marriage, such as it was, had given her the only “security” she’d ever known, and besides she still loved the man. And what would she do on her own? Yates may have insisted on blustering at Fred over the phone, and even threatened to kill him, but that was pretty much the end of it.
* * *
As the summer approached, Yates was all but broke again. He now had a firm offer to teach at the Iowa Workshop in the fall, but continued to vacillate: There was still a chance the movie would be made, or something might come up in New York—so he told Cassill, who’d discouraged him from taking the job unless he could make a full-year commitment. But now Cassill thought he should come to Iowa anyway and leave whenever he pleased, no matter what the inconvenience to the Workshop. Cassill had become disillusioned with the place: Recently a “mentally ill, incompetent” former student had attacked him in the campus newspaper, and the administration had offered little more than polite sympathy as a show of support. “Hemingway said writers are wolves and have got to stick together,” Cassill wrote his friend, “and that is exactly how I feel again now.” But Yates remained evasive—the fact was, he didn’t want to leave New York and teach in the sticks any more than he had four years earlier. He was even willing to take another PR job, though he was having a hard time convincing interviewers of that: “[H]e was earnestly seeking a kind of work he didn’t want, and that embarrassing contradiction seemed to leak from his very pores.” All this was a long way down from a year ago—from Frankenheimer’s palace in Malibu—and it began to look as though he’d have to brace himself for an Iowa winter after all. But then his friend Styron shook another deus ex machina out of his sleeve.
Attorney General Robert Kennedy was losing the sympathy of black Americans: The long-promised Civil Rights Bill had yet to materialize in May 1963, when activists in Birmingham were hosed and beaten and attacked by police dogs. Burke Marshall—the assistant attorney general in charge of civil rights—went to Alabama and negotiated a truce of sorts, but many viewed it as a feeble response to a widely televised outrage. Then, a week after Marshall’s return to Washington, Kennedy asked the writer James Baldwin to convene a group of influential black celebrities and meet him in New York so they could “talk this thing over.” The meeting was a fiasco. Along with Harry Belafonte, Lena Horne, and the playwright Lorraine Hansberry, Baldwin saw fit to invite a few hard-core activists, such as a young freedom rider who’d been repeatedly beaten and jailed. At one point the latter stuck his finger in Kennedy’s stunned face and told him he’d never fight for this country, that he had no country. “Was I impressed?” Baldwin’s brother David told the media after the meeting. “You see Bobby Kennedys every day, on the street, at cocktail parties. They just don’t get it. And he’s our Attorney General.”
Clearly the administration’s message (whatever it happened to be) wasn’t getting across, and Kennedy decided he needed a decent speechwriter. He asked an assistant, E. Barrett Prettyman, Jr., to find him a “real writer” who could take his ideas and “turn them into words with a snap and a bite to them.” Prettyman called their mutual friend Styron, who said he knew just the man: a superb novelist with extensive experience as a speechwriter, who also happened to need a job. “I don’t even know if I like the fucking Kennedys,” Yates replied when Styron called with the news; Yates pointed out that he’d always been an Adlai Stevenson man, and for that matter couldn’t “get much of a hard-on” for politics in general. “What have you got to lose?” Styron said, in effect, and a couple days later Yates boarded the Eastern Airlines shuttle for Washington.
At the Justice Department he was received by Prettyman, who briefly explained the job to him. It was the first of its kind: Before, Kennedy’s speeches had been cobbled together by committee, at a certain sacrifice of both style and substance. Worse, Kennedy himself was a rather uncomfortable speaker, who tended to swallow his words and lose the thread, such that an audience hardly knew when to applaud. What was needed, then, were “short, clipped sentences” to match Kennedy’s natural speaking style, as well as a lot of “humanity” to put over his civil rights agenda and counterbalance his “ruthless” image.
At the appointed time Yates was introduced to Kennedy, who struck him as remarkably boyish and slight (“part of his shirttail bulged loose on one side”). Kennedy noted with approval that Yates was not only a highly regarded writer, but also had a strong background in public relations. Then he said, “We’re living in very uncertain times, Mr. Yates, and those of us in a position of leadership are obliged to be responsive to issues like civil rights, but at the same time I have a great sense of responsibility here. Do you understand that?” As Yates later told an interviewer, he replied, “‘Yes, I do,’ without quite knowing what [Kennedy] was talking about.” Finally the attorney general asked him what he was currently working on, and Yates mentioned his novel about the last months of World War II. Kennedy observed that that was an “interesting period,” and expressed a hope that Yates would find time to work on it if he took the job. They shook hands.
After he left Kennedy’s office and rejoined Prettyman and press secretary Edwin Guthman, the latter informed Yates that he was actually in competition with two other writers from Newsweek and Time; as it happened, Prettyman (who hadn’t known this beforehand) wasn’t the only one Kennedy had asked to find a speechwriter. Guthman went on to explain that the three candidates would each submit a “trial assignment”—a civil rights speech to be delivered at an “exclusive girls’ college in the East.” Yates was intimidated by the prospect of competing with veteran journalists, but Prettyman felt confident that he had the edge: He was recommended by Styron, after all, and that had impressed the attorney general.
Back in New York, Yates spent an industrious all-nighter writing his trial assignment. Rather to his surprise he found he enjoyed the challenge, the craft, of imagining Kennedy as a kind of fictional character (with a Yatesian outlook, no less)—namely, an attractive young man seductively persuading a group of female admirers to support the cause of civil rights: “School is out, girls. You may sometimes regret your education, for a free mind will always insist on seeking out reality, and reality can be far more painful than the soft and comforting illusions of the intellectually poor.” Yates tightened the speech to fit the attention span of its audience, then typed the finished product on his beat-up Underwood and sent it off. A few days later he was summoned back to Washington. He had the job.
A problem remained: The woman he was leaving behind seemed determined to drink herself to death in his absence. One day Yates appeared at the Schulmans’ door with the blind-drunk Craige in tow. He had to leave for Washington, he explained. Would they mind looking after his girlfriend? Grace was furious: Just because she no longer worked full-time at Glamour, Yates had simply assumed she was free to care for a suicidal alcoholic. “It’s up to Grace,” said the good-natured Jerry, after which his wife stormed out and stayed in a hotel for the night. Yates’s girlfriend, meanwhile, ended up with Grace’s elderly mother, and Grace ended up caring for both of them.
* * *
“I only took the job because I needed the money,” Yates later claimed, “which is an odd thing because everybody else around me was there at some sacrifice of income. I was the only hireling.” That Yates always considered himself a “hireling” rather than a “true believer” is indisputable; he was determinedly skeptical where the Kennedys were concerned, and would tell (almost) anyone who asked that he still thought Stevenson should be president. But if money had been the only incentive, he might as well have gone to Iowa: As his new employers rather sheepishly put it, the salary was “more of an honorarium kind of thing”—enough for an ascetic writer, but hardly a lure in itself. For Yates, of course, there was more to it than that: “I couldn’t resist the opportunity to be that close to the Center of Power in America,” he admitted to a friend in 1964, “and it turned out to be a lively and interesting thing for a while. [Kennedy] seemed to like what I wrote, which fortunately was almost all about civil rights, and I think I even managed to put a few words in his mouth that were a little stronger than he otherwise might have used.” This is true: While Yates may have wavered in his opinion of the Kennedys, he was eager to enlist his talent in the cause of civil rights, and RFK was a potent mouthpiece. “Dick composed the most memorable phrases the Attorney General ever uttered,” said Prettyman, and Kurt Vonnegut went further: “He used RFK as a ventriloquist’s dummy.”
Happily the work didn’t require any particular knowledge of, or interest in, the nuts and bolts of public policy. Yates’s job was to convert raw data into eloquence: “BAG [i.e., “Bobby-A.G.”] is making speech in [City] on [Date],” Guthman’s assignment memo would read; “please look over attached material and let’s talk.” Yates would do so, perhaps call the sponsors of the event in question, then ask the ultracompetent research assistant to provide further material on, say, B’nai B’rith or Slovak Catholics in Ohio. If the speech was momentous enough, the staff would gather for brainstorming sessions in the attorney general’s office, where a shirtsleeved Kennedy would pace around the table and fitfully explain the “main points” he wanted to make. Sometimes Yates would meet with Kennedy alone, or Burke Marshall, and with both men he had a good but impersonal working relationship. “Dick was respectful but not intimidated,” said his colleague Jack Rosenthal, “and Kennedy appreciated that.”
At first Yates and Rosenthal shared a big sunny room in the Public Information office. Rosenthal, a future Pulitzer Prize–winning editorialist for the New York Times, was then a twenty-six-year-old Harvard graduate whom Guthman had brought in from Oregon to serve as assistant press secretary. Yates was fond of the young man, but found it all but impossible to work in the same room with him. “Sorry I’ve been so elusive,” Rosenthal would say (always) when he returned a reporter’s phone call, and finally he’d close with, “You’re a nice man.” Then he’d return another phone call. And another. For hours Yates would sit rigid at his typewriter, his legal pad, and listen to these exchanges over and over. Often people would wander in to chat. After a few days Yates buttonholed the research assistant and begged her to find him a private workspace, whereupon she led him to what appeared to be a broom closet at the back of the fifth floor: crowded into the narrow space was an old desk, a working typewriter, a few derelict chairs, and dusty storage cartons stacked to the ceiling. Yates called his new office the “Herbert Brownell Room” after the previous attorney general (whose files were stored there); the place was almost like home.
Yates was eager to make his mark, since he didn’t expect to be around very long: four months, to be exact. That was usually how long it took, according to Prettyman, for the FBI to conduct a methodical background check. When told as much, Yates confided that he’d had two nervous breakdowns in the past three years, both of which had required hospitalization, and wondered if the FBI was likely to pursue that sort of thing. Prettyman thought it highly probable. Still, some hope remained that they were mostly interested in Communist affiliations—until, a couple weeks into the job, Yates got a letter from Sheila: “The FBI wheels are very much in motion. A bright young man was here on Friday, inquiring closely into everything he could get me to talk about.… He did ask specifically about such things as alcoholism and ‘stability of character which might affect Mr. Yates’s ability to perform well in the assignment.’” So much for the lone Communist angle. “I questioned him a bit,” she went on, “and he said the investigation would extend to your ‘friends and associates.’” Yates was touched by his ex-wife’s loyalty—“I certainly said nothing,” she assured him—and others, too, tried to forestall his doom with the same sort of circumspection. Styron managed to skirt the subject of Yates’s drinking during the long afternoon he spent in an agent’s company, while Grace Schulman was downright uncooperative. Asked if Yates had any “vices,” she volunteered that he smoked too much, and when the shrewd G-man inquired whether Revolutionary Roadwas autobiographical, Schulman quoted Yates on the subject: “The emotions of fiction are autobiographical, but the facts never are.” The man looked puzzled, then moved on to another subject.
Nevertheless Yates’s days seemed numbered, and since the idea was to save as much money as possible, he was reluctant to take a second apartment in Washington. Commuting via the Eastern shuttle was hardly a thrifty alternative, nor was his drunken girlfriend a compelling reason to return to New York on a daily basis. At the beginning of June, then, Yates got in touch with his old army buddy Frank Knorr, whose house in the Washington suburbs included a self-contained basement apartment. Yates moved in, and for the most part proved an amenable guest. His drinking could hardly be less than conspicuous, but he regarded the Knorrs as nice, decent people, and he was at pains not to shock or inconvenience them. “Dick ate dinner with us during the week,” Janis Knorr recalled. “At five o’clock sharp he’d come upstairs rubbing his hands: ‘Cocktail time!’ Then he’d drink bourbon the rest of the night and tell stories. He’d get loud, but he wasn’t too obnoxious.” Yates doted on the Knorrs’ three-year-old daughter, Rebecca, who was given the thankless task of waking him each morning when he was “hungover and surly.” As with his own children, Yates made a special effort to act playful and pleasant around the girl, though Janis Knorr observed that he seemed “generally unhappy.” Around this time his daughter Sharon, during a visit to Washington, first became aware that her father drank too much: “The adults would play cards after dinner,” she said, “and Dad would drink steadily but the Knorrs wouldn’t.” Sharon was thirteen now, and the contrast stuck in her mind.
Whatever his other sorrows, Yates enjoyed his work at the Justice Department. He thought of speechwriting as show business, and assigned a particular persona to RFK depending on his audience—as Bill Grove put it in Uncertain Times, “once you’ve got the character established he kind of takes over, and the rest is mechanical.” For a B’nai B’rith dinner in Chicago, Yates imagined RFK as “a fine-looking young man” in his well-tailored tuxedo—the sort of mensch who knew he didn’t have to mince words with such an educated, receptive audience, but rather address them as fellow liberals who cared about human rights and knew all about persecution: “President George Washington once made a solemn pledge to the Jewish Synagogue in Newport, Rhode Island, when he said ‘The American government gives bigotry no sanction.’… They must have understood even then, those early Jewish settlers in New England, that bigotry doesn’t care whether it has governmental sanction or not.” Kennedy, reading over the speech, wondered aloud if Washington had really said that, and Yates replied that it was in Bartlett’s Quotations; Kennedy, pleased, remarked that it made a good opening statement. Yates’s next assignment, the Catholic Sokol Convention in Ohio, called for “a plainer, cornier, dumber Bobby Kennedy,” and Yates pictured him “glowing and disheveled in an open shirt with rolled-up sleeves.” Such relatively casual speeches tended to end with the same tag—“I think I’ve said most of what I came here to say now”—just before the folksy, personalized punch line: “Let me salute you with the only two words of Slovakian I understand: ‘Zdar Boh!’”
Yates’s first few speeches were so well received that, when President Kennedy prepared to address the nation on civil rights, the attorney general asked Yates to contribute a draft. The speech would be historically momentous—what many Americans had been waiting to hear ever since they’d elected Kennedy more than two years earlier. That same day, June 11, Governor George Wallace planned to fulfill his campaign promise to “stand at the schoolhouse door” and prevent black students from enrolling at the University of Alabama. RFK had dispatched his deputy Nicholas Katzenbach to counter Wallace’s “states’ rights” rhetoric and enforce the law, and a few hours later JFK would announce to the nation that he was sending an omnibus Civil Rights Bill to Congress.
On Sunday evening, June 9, Yates was assigned to write a version of the President’s speech; his deadline was the following Tuesday. He was advised that another draft—possibly several—would be generated by the White House, though it was all but certain that at least part of Yates’s contribution would be used: He was RFK’s speechwriter after all, and the president deferred to his brother on civil rights. Thus, a little more than two weeks into the job, Yates was already in a position to influence national destiny, and he was eager to make the most of it. For two nights and a day he cloistered himself in the Herbert Brownell Room, consuming coffee and cigarettes and trying to imagine JFK as a character—not “hunched and impassioned” like his brother, but “erect and cool”—a man whose appeal to the heart would seem all the more powerful in contrast with his usual “witty and sardonic” manner.
Early Tuesday morning Yates called his friend John Williams, who was then working on a piece for Holiday magazine titled “This Is My Country, Too,” about a black man traveling in America. (While in New York he’d planned to stay a few days at Yates’s vacant apartment in the Village, but on the second night he heard a scratching noise and discovered—“Holy shit!”—a horde of water beetles swarming over his sleeping bag. He packed up and left.) Yates wanted to read his finished draft to Williams, and ask him a few basic questions about civil rights. Williams tried to be helpful, though privately he was taken aback by Yates’s frank ignorance over what, exactly, was meant by “civil rights.” Years later Williams admitted as much in a letter: “Dick, I recall feeling this: ‘Yates is okay. I like Yates. He’s a good guy. Maybe that’s why he’s got to start this research from scratch.’” But it irritated Williams at the time, who thought it only too typical that a white man would be hired to write about issues he didn’t really understand, when there were plenty of black writers (e.g., himself) who did: “I felt I should have had your job,” he wrote Yates; “I felt I could have done a better job for my people and for people as a whole.” Yates was furious: “If my questioning you about ‘civil rights’ seemed naive,” he fired back, “and maybe even asinine, as I knew even at the time that it must, I thought you were taking it all in good faith and not begrudging me the job. And when I read that damn speech to you over the phone, I thought you liked it.”
The fact was, Yates took considerable pride in his work, and he’d been particularly pleased by the way his version of the president’s address had turned out. He told the Knorrs that he didn’t really expect it to be used, but urged them to watch television with him that night “just in case.” When the time came, as Janis Knorr recalled, Yates was taut with anticipation. “He wants to do well for MARR’s [i.e., Knorr’s] sake,” Yates scribbled in the margin of this episode in the Uncertain Times manuscript—that is, he’d always admired Frank Knorr as a good soldier who’d accepted him in spite of his incompetence, and he viewed the president’s speech as a chance to redeem himself. But it wasn’t to be. As Kennedy spoke, the Knorrs glanced furtively between Yates and the screen, and it was clear that each line struck him as a fresh disappointment. At one point he suddenly came alive—“There! I wrote that!”—but it was a false alarm, and when it was over Yates seemed embarrassed. As the scene concludes in the novel: “Grove thought he could see the Marrs exchanging very slight, fond smiles of amusement—smiles suggesting that their houseguest might really not be such an important person after all.”*
Other than a slightly more perceptible dislike of JFK, Yates gave little sign of dwelling on the matter. That summer the attorney general had to appear before several congressional committees in support of the Civil Rights Bill, and his speechwriter was kept busy composing his formal testimony. Whatever Yates lacked as a policy specialist was redeemed somewhat by a willing heart and a positive grasp of the moral issues—not to mention a way with words—as witnessed by the remarks he wrote for Kennedy’s appearance before the Senate Commerce Committee on July 1:
White people of whatever kind—even prostitutes, narcotics pushers, Communists, or bank robbers—are welcome at establishments which will not admit certain of our federal judges, ambassadors, and countless members of our Armed Forces.… For most of the past hundred years we have imposed the duties of citizenship on the Negro without allowing him to enjoy the benefits. We have demanded that he obey the same laws as white men, pay the same taxes, fight and die in the same wars. Yet in nearly every part of the country, he remains the victim of humiliation and deprivation no white citizen would tolerate. All thinking Americans have grown increasingly aware that discrimination must stop—not only because it is legally insupportable, economically wasteful, and socially destructive, but above all because it is morally wrong.
Contrary to John Williams’s understandable chagrin, Yates may well have been the right person for the job after all, or at least not the wrong one.
* * *
One of the secretaries in the Public Information office was a fetching, good-natured young woman named Wendy Sears, the twenty-two-year-old daughter of a prominent Brahmin lawyer in Boston. She and Yates engaged in a hesitant flirtation for much of that summer: Sears felt shy in the writer’s presence, but thought he was one of the handsomest men she’d ever seen, while Yates seemed too bewildered those first few weeks to take more than polite notice. One day, during a dull meeting in the attorney general’s office, Yates passed her a note—“Bored?”—and Sears scribbled back “Oh, yes!” The practice took hold: While the rest of the (male) staff solemnly discussed civil rights legislation, Yates would mock them either in prose or cartoon form (he was still a good caricaturist), and pass the results under the table to the perky stenographer. At one point Kennedy caught Sears pausing thus in her shorthand and became vexed—“We’ve got to get somebody else in here!”—whereupon Yates sprang to her defense: It was hisfault, he said, and firmly suggested that Miss Sears be allowed to stay. “That was typical of Dick,” she said. “He wouldn’t even let Kennedy be offensive.” Yates was naturally given to chivalry on behalf of attractive young women, though he did find Sears “a little heavy in the leg.” She seemed to sense as much, and when she came upon the phrase “unpardonably thick ankles” in Revolutionary Road, she approached the author: “Dick, how thick do ankles have to be before they’re ‘unpardonable’?” Yates recognized his own epithet and laughed. “That got the ball rolling,” Sears recalled.
“I have a new girlfriend,” Yates announced to the Schulmans upon his return to New York, “and she has really sturdy parents.” By then he’d come to dread the sight of the slatternly, whiskey-for-breakfast Craige, whose dissolute behavior he blamed in part on an unwholesome family background. But Wendy Sears was the healthy, well-groomed embodiment of good breeding, and what’s more she laughed at his jokes. When she was pouty Yates called her “Wendy Serious” (a name that stuck whatever her mood), and he’d go to any length to cheer her up. Their mutual delight was infectious. As Jack Rosenthal put it, “Wendy and Dick were the hub of a circle of laughter—cynical, not necessarily loyal to the powers-that-be, but good-natured.”
Another member of the circle was an affable young AP reporter, Joe Mohbat, who shared a cubbyhole at the Justice Department with his UPI counterpart. Yates and Mohbat had a common fondness for certain kinds of sophisticated silliness, and became lifelong friends. Over lunch at the Kansas City Steakhouse or Hammel’s, the two would swap “Tom Swifties” while Yates tanked up on vodka martinis (he preferred “something brown” for later) and laughed until he coughed so hard “it hurt to listen,” as Mohbat remembered. Often they were joined by Rosenthal and Wendy Sears, and the well-oiled Yates would regale them with table-slapping contempt for some fresh outrage among the “tight-ass political types” back at the office. His favorite expression at such times was “big fucking deal,” primarily applied to the brown-nosing toadies who clustered around the Kennedys. He made fun of the way Guthman jumped whenever“BAG” buzzed, or the way a certain young writer for Look magazine hung around the office all day dropping the phrase Bob and I. “Dick had an objective outsider’s eye in a circle otherwise composed of Kennedy admirers,” said Rosenthal, who (despite his own youthful earnestness at the time) liked the way Yates sat back in his chair and “laughed at the whole thing.”
The group found clever ways to fill downtime in the office. Mohbat filed his wire-service copy as briskly as possible so he could “lurk for tidbits” around the fifth floor, which often meant ducking into the Herbert Brownell Room to cut-up with Yates. The latter liked to boast that he’d worked so hard on Revolutionary Road he knew it word for word, so Mohbat and Sears would kill time trying to stump him with his own novel: They’d read the first few words of a random passage, and the author would (flawlessly) supply the rest. Also they played a word game devised by Rosenthal—a former “Quiz Kid” finalist—called “Merkins,” taken from LBJ’s phrase “Mah fellow Merkins.” The game entailed contracting syllables according to American dialect—for example (Yates’s favorite), “Jeat jet?” for Did you eat yet? from Salinger’s “Just Before the War with the Eskimos.”* All day long they’d leave “Merkins” on each other’s desk and keep score, awarding one point per contracted syllable—hence three points for “Shadune?” (What are you doing?), two for “Salacornta how you look at it” (It’s all according to how you look at it), and so on. Such silliness spilled over to dinners at Wendy Sears’s Georgetown apartment; because of RFK’s crusade against organized crime, Yates would compulsively name his food after mobsters—“Potatoes” Dinado, “Peas” Gambino—and collapse into hacking laughter.
From the beginning, though, Yates’s friends at the Justice Department noticed that there was something a little off about him. “His rages were tyrannical when he was drunk,” said Mohbat. “He’d shout, cough, swear like a sailor. You couldn’t believe he wrote so elegantly when he talked like that. And it was all over nothing—some neutral talk about politics or whatever.” Yates was particularly impatient with Wendy Sears, whose youth and relative passivity made her an easy target for “correction”—as when she’d say something ungrammatical or use a hackneyed expression like relationship or yea high. Right away Yates insisted on adopting a mentorly role à la Fitzgerald’s “College of One” vis-à-vis Sheilah Graham: He gave Sears a list of ten books “she might find nourishing” from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries,† and occasionally treated her to spontaneous disquisitions on, say, the meaning of “craftsmanship.” And whenever she’d let some solecism slip, he’d sigh, “Wrongedy wrong wrong wrong” and bemoan how poorly educated even genteel girls were these days. When Sears happened to mention that she’d attended the same prep school (Beaver Country Day in Brookline) as Yates’s former girlfriend Sandra Walcott, his response was to remember how “appalled” he’d been when Walcott misspelled the word “Congratulations.” In fact, this aspect of Yates’s relationship (attachment, rather) with Wendy Sears would survive to the very end: Almost thirty years later, the deathly ill Yates told Sears that he’d enjoyed her latest letter, “except that part where you refer to your daughter as a ‘private person.’”
For a while, though, Sears was “enraptured” by Yates. He was quirky and pedantic, yes, but at his best he was the most charming of men. Sears and her roommate Suzie would beg him to sing—especially “I Found a Million-Dollar Baby in a Five-and-Ten-Cent Store,” the many verses of which he’d croon with a winsome lilt in his voice. When Sears told him that her father Samuel was a good amateur pianist who’d written lyrics for Hasty Pudding shows at Harvard, the wistful Yates wondered if he’d written, by chance, “Columbus Discovered America” (he hadn’t), and then of course Yates would sing that, too. The song reminded him of his daughters (many things did), and he’d happily begin telling stories about them, imitating their voices in turn. For her part Sears was adoring and tactful, a good sport, and as Yates liked to say: “She doesn’t tell me long, boring stories about people I don’t know.”
And finally he liked the fact that she was very young and had a youthful sense of fun. When he mentioned he didn’t have a proper typewriter at his apartment, Sears encouraged him to steal one of the many neglected machines at the Justice Department—a caper they pulled off together, under the proverbial cloak of darkness. Around this time, too, Bob Riche came to town and had dinner with the couple at an elegant restaurant, and was “horrified” when Sears casually removed a bottle of wine from one of the tables and stuck it in her purse. As it happened, that was the night Riche informed his friend that he was marrying the woman he’d met at Bread Loaf three years before. Yates remembered her well. “You mean you’re gonna marry the orphan?” he said.
* * *
As the summer ended Yates’s speechwriting duties began to pall. The words he’d put in Kennedy’s mouth had gone a long way toward improving the man’s image and advancing his agenda, but Yates’s services were rarely acknowledged except for the odd, casual compliment. Kennedy gave no sign of letting Yates into his inner or even outer circle: He didn’t invite him to lunch or dinner or for visits to Hickory Hill. And while Yates certainly hadn’t taken the job with the hope of cultivating a camaraderie with the attorney general, he resented what Styron called the “cold transaction” of working for the Kennedys. It became less and less gratifying when the public cheered his speeches, since he never got any of the credit. Of course Yates realized this was his job, but as a matter of principle it rankled that people like himself did all the work while the Kennedys simply accepted it as their due.
Above all he was anxious to get back to his fiction, an attitude that puzzled his colleagues on the fifth floor: As Rosenthal put it, they didn’t understand “why anyone would bother with ‘mere literature,’ when one could be involved in changing the world.” Besides, if Yates insisted that speechwriting was “whoring” but he needed the money, why not write fiction in his spare time or vice versa? Why not write both? But Yates couldn’t compartmentalize that way—“When I’m writing, I’m writing”—and it wasn’t as if he could alternate fortnights working on one or the other, as he’d done in his Remington Rand days. Meanwhile, as always when he wasn’t writing fiction, Yates drank to numb the painful sense of lost time, not to say a bleak suspicion that he was already washed up as a serious writer. Once, after returning to Washington via the Eastern shuttle, he mentioned to Sears that he’d spotted John Kenneth Galbraith on the plane: “God,” he said, “if the plane had gone down, all they’d talk about was Galbraith.” And when John Williams visited Washington as part of his Holiday junket, he was startled by the change in his friend: “Dick was drinking like he needed to get out of himself one way or the other. He said, ‘I’m the best fucking writer in America!’ I’d never seen him so full of himself—usually he was laid back and just let the work speak for itself.” But there hadn’t been any work in a long time (arguably none worth keeping in almost two years), and such boasts were the gasps of a drowning man.
Perhaps there was some consolation, then, in the imminent prospect of a thumbs-down from the FBI. Yates expected as much, and moved out of the Knorrs’ house in late August; he rented a basement apartment on Ashmead Place off Connecticut Avenue, where he could stay close to Wendy Sears and work on his novel in relative privacy once his job ended at the Justice Department. Sure enough, the FBI report landed on Kennedy’s desk almost exactly four months after Yates’s hiring, and alcoholism and mental instability were its major themes. The interview that followed in Kennedy’s office—a stock anecdote in Yates’s repertoire—happened pretty much as reported in Uncertain Times:
“Would you describe yourself as a heavy drinker?”
“Yes, I would.”
Kennedy gave a small nod as if to commend him for honesty.
“But I don’t drink when I’m working,” he lied. “I’ve never done that. Be sort of like drinking and driving a car.”
“I see. Still, the most disturbing parts of the report for me are these several hospitalizations you’ve had for mental or emotional illness.” Only two, Bob, Grove wanted to say; it’s only happened twice, but he kept his mouth shut. A drop of sweat seeped from one armpit and slid down his ribs. “That’s a cause of some concern to me,” Kennedy said. “Still, your work here has been fine. It’s been excellent.… Tell me something, though, Bill. When you had these several—breakdowns of yours in the past, has it been possible for you to sort of sense them coming in advance?” …
“Yes, I can, Bob,” he said, though that had never been true; and to soften it on the side of less flagrant dishonesty he said “At least I’m pretty sure I can.”
“I see. Well then, look.… Suppose we leave it this way: If that should ever happen while you’re working for me—if you ever sense you’re in some kind of imminent difficulty of that kind, I mean, will you come and tell me about it?”
“Certainly, Bob.”
Yates was allowed to stay. As a speechwriter he wasn’t a high-security risk, and the decision was ultimately Kennedy’s to make. More mysterious, perhaps, was Yates’s willingness to prevaricate in order to keep a job he didn’t much want anymore. The easy explanation was that he still needed the money—as of course he did—but a few other factors come to mind: One, he was loath to have it known that he’d been fired because of mental illness; two, at whatever level he actually dreaded the prospect of writing (or rather not writing) fiction again, and was somewhat relieved to have an excuse to put it off; and three, at the time he badly needed the esteem he derived from being RFK’s speechwriter, and liked to think Kennedy needed him as much as he needed Kennedy. “I think it’s sort of important to consider,” says Bill Grove after the FBI interview, “… that [Kennedy] may not want to lose his voice.… I’ve written every fucking word that’s come out of his mouth for the past four months.”
Yates’s job had been considered “provisional” pending the FBI report, after which the news was finally released to the press: “After searching for months,” Newsweek belatedly reported in its September 16 issue, “Robert Kennedy has found a new speechwriter. He is 37-year-old novelist Richard Yates … who has just finished a screenplay for William Styron’s Lie Down in Darkness. (Styron suggested him for the job.) The Attorney General started looking after a stormy session with Negro leaders in New York convinced him that his civil-rights speeches were missing the mark.”* At last Yates would get some credit in the public mind for RFK’s occasional eloquence, though perhaps the most intriguing result of the Newsweek announcement was a phone call: Was this Richard Yates the writer, a woman wanted to know, and if so how long had he been working in Washington? “Yes,” Yates replied to the first question, and “about four months” to the second. The woman sighed, explaining that she’d been seeing a guy in the Village who claimed to be Richard Yates, though various people had suggested he was an imposter. “Can you imagine?” Yates told friends. “People getting laid claiming they’re me?”
But such glee over reminders (ribald and otherwise) of his literary importance was mingled with rue. It almost hurt to be told that the French edition of Eleven Kinds of Loneliness had been selected as Best Foreign Book of the Month, that reviews were ecstatic, when Yates himself had lost faith in his ability to write a short story. As for his stalled novel, he certainly wouldn’t be able to make his January delivery date now that he’d indefinitely committed himself to Kennedy, and really he wondered if he’d ever finish the book at all, or if he should even try. Sam Lawrence tried to goad him back to work with an offer of five hundred dollars a month until the book was finished, but Yates declined: He was already in debt to the publisher and had little incentive to accept further advances at his own risk.
Yates’s company became more of a mixed blessing than ever. In the early days of their courtship, Wendy Sears had caught glimpses of his occasional volatility, but never in her life had she witnessed such uncontrollable rage as when she let drop that her mother had questioned whether “Richard Yates” was his real name. Yates was convinced the woman had meant to imply he was some kind of fraud—déclassé, a foreigner perhaps, not worthy of her blueblood daughter and so forth. It didn’t help that the woman had also seen fit to belittle the Back Bay Ledger (“Never heard of it”), which had provided one of the more glowing blurbs for Eleven Kinds of Loneliness. “He went berserk,” said Sears, “and he wasn’t even drunk. It went on and on—‘What does she know?’—for almost two hours, shouting, his face red. It was like something snapped in his brain.”
Yates seemed to prize the fact that Sears came from “sturdy” Brahmin stock, but it also piqued his deepest insecurities. The worst of his outbursts were almost always related to matters of class, and he often gave Sears the impression of railing against an abstraction rather than her (“You rich Boston debutantes! Who the hell do you think you are?”). “It had become important lately to find good reasons for losing his temper at Wendy,” Yates wrote in Uncertain Times*—this in the context of a “fictionalized” account of his meeting one of Sears’s cousins: a young man who happened to remark that he wanted to work for the FBI in order to carry a gun. “That cousin of yours,” says Grove, “is nothing but a spoiled, stupid, brutal fucking kid.… He’s a graduate of Exeter … he’s a graduate of Brown University; and now all he wants to do in the world is carry a pistol. That’s how fascists are made, sweetheart: That’s the way the Nazi party was conceived and born.” Perhaps, but in real life Sears had readily conceded that such a remark was unworthy of her cousin, that in fact he wasn’t a bad sort at all, but anyway why was Yates screaming at her? She hadn’t said anything about wanting to carry a pistol. And why drag Exeter and Brown into it?
The worst lay ahead. In early November Sam Lawrence came to town and took the couple to Billy Martin’s Carriage House on Wisconsin Avenue, a “suave, expensive and quiet restaurant” (as Yates described it), where one could have drinks around the piano before adjourning to a gilded dining room. Yates liked that sort of thing and seemed at ease, when suddenly he bellowed that Lawrence was a son of a bitch and stood ranting at him for reasons that nobody (Yates included) could later fathom. Sears begged him to sit down and be quiet, Lawrence looked bemused, and finally “four hefty waiters” carried the shouting, writhing author out the door and threw him bodily into the street. The piano played louder throughout the ordeal, like a saloon scene in a Western movie. Sears fled the restaurant and walked home, weeping with humiliation, while Lawrence paid the check and implored the management not to call the cops. “That, I guess, is the kind of awful experience that can sometimes be laughed off,” Yates wrote with retrospective serenity in 1972, “as [Lawrence] and I were able to do the very next day, when I crept to his hotel to apologize and retrieve my raincoat.” Yates was somewhat less apologetic to Sears, and when he described the scene to Joe Mohbat it was “almost as if [Yates] were talking about a separate person, a person he didn’t like, a character in a book: ‘Can you imagine such an asshole?’”
* * *
After the FBI report, Yates made an effort not to drink while at work, but it was a losing battle. Eight or nine hours of sobriety a day, at a job he now actively disliked, meant that he drank with even greater abandon at night and on weekends—so much so, in fact, that temperance at any time became out of the question. Every morning he’d be ashen and shaky with hangover, and the only remedy was to sneak well-paced shots of vodka throughout the day. Neither his heart nor his head was in his work anymore, and people in the office began to notice: His speeches were less original, even a bit lifeless, and Yates himself seemed fed up with more than just the work. When Kennedy and Guthman returned from a trip to the Midwest, the latter remarked that “people out there” were “the realAmericans”—the folks who paid taxes and fought wars and so forth. Yates held his tongue, but later exploded to Wendy Sears: “That asshole! What does he mean, ‘the real Americans’? What, the Negroes aren’t real?” Yates thought it a fatuous, reactionary thing to say, and all too typical of the basic hypocrisy that lurked at the heart of the whole political establishment, however much obscured by the liberal cant of the Kennedys. He wanted out.
Wednesday, November 20, was the attorney general’s birthday, and his staff was invited to a White House reception that night for the Supreme Court and other members of the judiciary. For the first and last time Yates shook hands with President Kennedy, the object of his scorn and perhaps wistful envy, and then danced with Wendy Sears in the East Room. At one point he ran out of cigarettes, and was aghast to discover there were none on the premises.
Two days later Joe Mohbat and reporter Jack Vandenburg of the UPI were returning from lunch when they passed the teletype room on the fifth floor, where Yates stood watching the chattering ticker. He waved them inside: “They shot the president!” he hissed. “They shot the fucking president!” The reporters ran to their phones, and Yates left for the airport to spend the weekend with his daughters in New York. He was back in time to watch the funeral cortege pass beneath the fifth-floor balcony of the Justice Department. Unlike many of the others, Yates was somber but dry-eyed. The following Thursday was Thanksgiving, and Yates and Wendy met the Mohbats for a restaurant dinner in Potomac, Maryland. The four hardly spoke. Yates shook his head a few times and said “Holy shit.”
Yates had wanted to quit “gracefully,” he wrote a friend—“and just about that time the president decided to go to Dallas. And one of the millions of tiny changes brought about by that tragic business was that my job was dissolved. So I didn’t have to quit after all, and was able to leave Robert with no hard feelings.” In the wake of the assassination, at least, Yates had come to think of the attorney general as “Robert”—not the more common “Bob,” or even (as in moments of particular ambivalence) one of “the fucking Kennedys.” Whatever else Yates thought of the man, he didn’t doubt his basic decency anymore: Not only had Kennedy treated him with kindness and tact over the FBI matter, but it was hard not to have tender feelings for a man as ravaged with grief as the president’s brother.
Yates continued to take a dim view of JFK. In the words of John Wilder in Disturbing the Peace, he considered the president “a rich boy, a glamour boy, a senator who’d never once spoken out against McCarthy even after it was safe for anyone to do so, a candidate who’d bought the primaries and rigged the convention.” In fact Yates made that exact remark, more or less, while explaining to Arthur Schlesinger Jr. why he (Yates) remained “an unregenerate Stevenson man”; and Schlesinger’s reply was essentially that of Paul Borg in the novel: “I think we have to agree that Stevenson was a Greek. Kennedy’s a Roman. We need Romans in the country now.”* But Yates didn’t buy that. To him Kennedy was a shallow opportunist, the ultimate triumph of surface over substance, and such a president should be deplored no matter what he manages to accomplish (via the efforts of others, as Yates would have it). Perhaps to mock his own unworldliness, though, Yates considered the following quote from Schlesinger as a possible epigraph to Uncertain Times: “Never look for political ideas in a literary mind.”
* * *
Yates’s sister Ruth had deteriorated rapidly since her decision, a few months before, to remain with her husband. That summer she’d been too drunk to attend her daughter Dodo’s high school graduation, and Fred was far from sober when he arrived (late) for the ceremony. “Everybody in town knew about the situation,” their daughter recalled. “It was a horrible experience growing up in that house, especially after Fred [Jr.] went into the service and Peter went off to school.” Dodo had never really known her mother as a sane, functioning person: By the time the girl reached puberty, Ruth had given up most of her avocations at Fred’s behest; she drank in the morning and tried to sleep it off during the day, in hope of being “fresh” when her husband returned from work. Their daughter would find bottles stashed all over the house, even around the mailbox where she waited for the school bus; one morning Ruth caught the girl trying to remove the hidden bottles and came after her with a kitchen knife. Another time Dodo found her mother in the closet trying to hang herself with knotted neckties: Fred had been out of town, and Ruth was terrified of his coming home that evening and finding her drunk again.
“She felt like everything was drifting away from her,” said her sister-in-law Louise. Not only were the children gone most of the time, but her husband had gotten into the habit of “working overtime” and leaving town as often as possible “on business.” A few months after Ruth had called her brother for help, she turned up at Louise Rodgers’s Manhattan apartment in the middle of the night. “Your brother doesn’t love me anymore,” she was sobbing. “I have nothing to live for.” That Fred had girlfriends was hardly a mystery (“He was spoiled, from a good family, so he figured he could do what he wanted,” said his daughter); more puzzling to his children was why he wouldn’t arrange (or let anyone else arrange) some kind of long-term care for his alcoholic and now suicidal wife. When confronted, he’d say he was “handling it.”
That winter, Ruth called her brother again and asked if she could come stay with him in Washington. This time Yates gently talked her out of it: He was working hard on his novel and needed privacy; besides, his apartment was too small, and most of the time he shared it with Wendy Sears. The truth was that he’d come to believe his sister was a hopeless case, and felt contempt for the way she’d “fucked up her life”—become the victim of a man like Fred Rodgers, whom (Yates was sure of it now) she’d never really leave. And even though Ruth’s call depressed him, he told Sears he was “glad it happened.” It brought him back to the “hard facts of life,” he said, so he could get on with putting those facts on paper and not worry about being so goddamn “literary.”
A few weeks later Ruth was in Central Islip, the state mental hospital on Long Island. She’d crashed into a parked car, and a boat anchor in the back of her station wagon had shot forward and hit her in the back of the head. When Yates visited her at the hospital, her shaved scalp was swathed in a large turbanlike bandage; but the injury was incidental to the main diagnosis of acute alcoholism that had brought her to Central Islip. Somewhere, too, among the 122 buildings of the vast asylum was Dookie, who’d been moved there after St. Johnland became too expensive.
Ruth would be in and out of Central Islip for what remained of her life, but she no longer discussed such matters with her brother. A few weeks after her first hospitalization she typed a letter to Yates full of chatty domestic news: Her son Peter had presented her with a secondhand Underwood portable for her birthday; Fred Jr.’s wife had just given birth to a baby girl who looked exactly like Fred Sr. (“this makes [my husband] very angry, because it makes him tend to feel like a grandfather, and he doesn’t care for the idea”); she’d been harvesting blackberries all week even though she hated blackberries (“I do this, remembering what the man said when asked why he wanted to climb Mt. Everest—‘Because it’s there’”); and finally she hadn’t visited Dookie lately because her driving was “limited to strictly local stuff, at least until I gain a little more self-confidence and grow a little more hair.” The entire letter was transcribed almost word for word in The Easter Parade, where it serves as evidence that Sarah Grimes has surrendered herself to the illusion that she is “the happiest, most contented little housewife in the world.” For the purpose of his novel, though, Yates saw fit to cut the last line of Ruth’s actual letter: “It’s quite lonely around here.”
* * *
The night before he left Washington for a Christmas visit with his daughters, Yates stayed up until three A.M. wrapping presents; Wendy Sears offered to come over and help, but he wanted to do it himself. He’d arranged to spend the holiday with Sharon and Monica at the Plaza Hotel. By then the girls had moved back to Mahopac, and their father was eager to compensate for what he called “that proletarian town” by giving them a taste of high life during their visits—nice restaurants, the theater, the Plaza. It was an almost wholly successful Christmas: The girls ordered butterscotch sundaes from room service and read Eloise with Yates; they romped in the hallway and wished they could live there forever. Monica recalls that the only dark moments came when she—then six—sensed her father’s almost oppressive need to please them; she wondered if he could really afford such gestures, since he usually lived in a basement.
Yates was briefly in better spirits now that his work for the Kennedys was over. He took Wendy Sears to New York for the first time and introduced her to friends: They had dinner at the Blue Mill with Broyard, who seemed to like Sears in an unsalacious way, and spent a jolly evening with the Schulmans, who were naturally relieved to have the sodden Craige off their hands. In fact the visit went remarkably without a hitch, though Sears vowed never to pass another night in Yates’s “dark, awful, dirty” apartment at 27 Seventh Avenue South.
Yates continued to live in Washington until early April; he claimed to like the town well enough, but it was mostly a matter of having a warm body in his bed at night. Wendy Sears, however, was almost frantically longing for freedom. She was still fond of Yates and awed by his stature as a writer, but as a constant companion he was a disaster. Even times of relative calm were nerve-racking. The air was forever charged with some dire emotion—as when Sears gave him, for his thirty-eighth birthday, a black leather album with the gold-embossed title, The Speeches of Robert F. Kennedy, by Richard Yates. “I thought he was going to cry,” she said. “He was always so astonished when you gave him a gift, or did anything nice for him.” Then in March they took a larky drive through the Virginia countryside to visit Yates’s old friend Ed Kessler, who’d taken a job at William and Mary. As with the New York trip, the weekend was almost ominously tranquil: Kessler led them on a droll historical tour of Williamsburg, and later they attended an elegant cocktail party where they mingled with the likes of Winthrop Rockefeller.
But Sears knew it was only a matter of time, and when the storm broke it was worse than ever. Looking back, she can’t remember why they stopped at that motel outside Washington, or why Yates started screaming and throwing things, only that it went on for a long time and was definitely the last straw. It wasn’t a question of his being menacing, or actually throwing things at her, or even taking her into account one way or the other. But the episode was terrifying all the same, not to say exhausting, and when Yates left Washington a few weeks later they agreed to part as friends. He lerved her, he said, which was a little less than love but more than like. Sears was just glad he was at a safe distance now, so she could enjoy his finer qualities via letters and phone calls.
Granted, he was under a strain. At the end of December he’d finally decided to accept Lawrence’s arrangement of five hundred dollars a month up to three thousand—this for a novel he was by no means confident of finishing, at any rate not within six months, and meanwhile the money was just enough to cover child support and alimony with a pittance left over. Monica McCall continued to make encouraging noises about the lucrative prospects of Lie Down in Darkness, but that bubble burst (again) in January when Frankenheimer decided to let his option lapse. The following month Yates learned he was the recipient of a Brandeis University Creative Arts Award (“for recognition of promise”) in the amount of a thousand dollars, to be awarded at the Waldorf in May; Nabokov was slated for special recognition that night, and certainly Yates hoped to meet the great man,* though his own award hardly altered the fact that by the end of the summer he’d be broke. McCall tried to interest him in writing a sixty thousand–word social history of Saratoga Springs, New York, for Prentice-Hall (“There are of course a number of elements involved: money, society, health, gambling and horses, and I think that such a book could be fun to do”), but Yates was not interested. Finally by mid-February his outlook was bleak enough for him to accept, at long last, a teaching position at the Iowa Workshop beginning that fall. Cassill was pleased to gain another ally, and replied with the cheerful news that Yates would be getting eight—rather than the aforesaid seven—thousand dollars a year; he was advised to buy a car, however.
Money was one thing, but Yates’s erratic behavior was mostly fueled by despair over his work. More than three years earlier he’d conceived his novel, all too ambitiously, as a bildungsroman to rival Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man; but on bad days he saw the thing as little more than so much pointless confession, and wondered whether he should simply cut his losses and write something else. On what appeared to be a relatively good day in mid-March he wrote his friend Miller Williams,
I’m working like a bastard on this second novel, which is at the stage now when I sometimes think the only respectable thing to do is burn it, but on betters days I continue to hold pretty grandiose hopes for the damn thing. It’s a tough one, about five times more “autobiographical” than Revolutionary Road, with all the possibilities for Naked Embarrassment implied in that statement. But if I can bring it off it might be good.
Such occasional confidence was mostly due to the novel’s excellent self-contained prologue, in which Prentice visits his deluded mother in New York while on leave from the army. That part of the book was finished, was “formed” as Yates put it, but the problem he couldn’t solve was how to relate it to the rest of the novel—that is, how to find some plausible connection between Prentice’s war experiences and his disenchantment with (and subsequent liberation from) his mother. Was any such connection really valid? And wasn’t the whole point of the prologue to suggest that Prentice is already disenchanted with his mother, even before he goes overseas?
So Yates brooded. And while there were days when he worked “like a bastard,” there were others he spent writing letters to Wendy Sears, or making lists, or “doing research” and drinking. He asked Sears to find books about the Seventy-fifth Infantry Division, the Ninth Army, and wondered what she thought of such prospective titles as Rite of Passage, Prentice, and The Straggler (one of the many rejected titles for Revolutionary Road). Sears was nothing if not obliging: She visited the Library of Congress on his behalf, and tended to prefer whatever title was presently on his mind.
A representative artifact of this period is a curious group of poems Yates wrote amid the inertia of evading his novel. The title pretty much says it all: “QWERTYUIOP
: Six Efforts To Achieve Coherence While Using Only the Second Row of Keys on the Standard Typewriter.” The novelty of such an exercise suggests a writer with far too much time on his hands. Fittingly the theme of all six “efforts” is literary failure. A few samples:
A CONFESSION OF FULBRIGHTS
We were poor, we were witty,
Our poetry tip-top, our Europe pretty.
We quit our torpor, quit our rue—
Yet O!—we quit our typewriter, too.
A RELIGIOUS-CONVERT WRITER’S LAMENT
O Piety, Piety, prior to you
I wrote poor yet I wrote true.
I wrote out worry, wrote up riot.
O Piety, Piety, Piety—Quiet!
A LOVE SONG
Pet, I owe you poetry.
I write to you; yet, eye-to-eye,
You pout, you weep, require rye.
O Pet, I owe you poetry.
Yates recited his verse during a boozy night with Styron in Martha’s Vineyard, and the latter was so impressed that he wanted to see about getting it published in the New York Review of Books. Alas, Styron misplaced the one rumpled page Yates mailed him that summer, which naturally turned out to be the only copy of the manuscript. Eventually Yates got around to rewriting the poems from memory, and they appeared in Esquire two and a half years later. Twice as many years would pass before Yates’s second novel was published.
* * *
At Sam Lawrence’s suggestion, Yates arranged to spend the summer at the MacDowell Colony in Peterborough, New Hampshire, where in theory he would finish his novel in a placid yet stimulating environment—as Lawrence described it, “you work all day and carouse from 5 to 6 p.m. on: writers, painters, sculptors, composers.” Monica McCall had another client who lived in the area, the writer Richard Frede, and Yates stopped at the man’s house for a dinner party en route. “Yates was pleasant enough,” Frede remembered, “but still it was a rather fearful experience: He seemed to be drinking compulsively, hurting himself with drink. One after another.”
At the colony Yates was given a secluded cabin with a desk, bed, and fireplace, where at first he was able to settle down to work; the only interruption before cocktail hour was a pickup truck that delivered box lunches between 11:30 and noon, with one’s letters tucked next to the sandwiches. Wendy Sears wrote almost every other day, and Yates also got some rather nostalgic gossip from Sheila and the Schulmans: The first reported that her brother Charlie was now working at Reader’s Digest (something to do with computers) as part of a program prescribed by his doctors to help him “get along with people,” while Grace mentioned that Barbara Beury had been in touch asking if she still had a chance at that Glamour job (“I’ll put in a dime if you like,” Grace added wryly. “Clinkety, clinkety clink. The last one was Jerry”). Such news of his previous lives in Washington, New York, and beyond was calmly received at a distance, and during the first week Yates managed to write fiction at the astounding rate of three to five pages a day.
It didn’t last. As he became better acquainted with his fellow colonists, the nights grew longer and more bibulous, and soon he was entangled in a distracting affair with a “rich, waspy” painter manquée named Victoria. He continued to write a fair amount, but there were days of crapulent depression when he wondered why he bothered. At the beginning of August he called Wendy Sears and told her he’d finished the last chapter, though he didn’t seem pleased about it, and a few days later he vented his frustration in a letter to the Schulmans:
The damn place [MacDowell] is a little too Bread-Loafy for comfort—by which I mean that too many evenings get wasted having Brilliant Conversations with the Nicest and Best People you’ve Ever Met, and then waking up with a terrible hangover and going to the damn typewriter as if it were an instrument of torture. Sometimes I get good working days in and hardly drink at all; other times everything goes to hell. Worst feature now is that I’m horribly aware of the time slipping away, and feel a compulsion to finish the effing book by September First whether it’s any good or not—and this, of course, is not exactly a healthy attitude.
One good thing: there’s a guy here with a collection of old-timey phonograph records, and I’ve mastered both lyrics and tune of an absolutely great Al Jolson item called “Where Did Robinson Crusoe Go with Friday on Saturday Night?”—I promise to sing it for you loud and clear the minute I’m back in town.
By then his friend Victoria had left MacDowell to go abroad, and Yates was all the more free to write or drink or sing or sit in his cabin and brood. When Edmund Wilson visited the colony for a weekend in mid-August, the languishing Yates declined an invitation to deliver the salutatory remarks; Wendy Sears called to ask him about it, but Yates was too drunk to give a coherent account—“Oh well,” he managed to sigh. The next day Sears wrote him a scolding letter: “Brendan Behan drank because when he did, he knew he couldn’t write and this was his excuse.”
After he left MacDowell at the end of the month, Yates stopped in New York for ten days to wrap up his affairs before moving to Iowa City. After exactly five years of Dostoyevskian habitation, one imagines a faint pang on Yates’s part as he carried his few possessions out of the basement at 27 Seventh Avenue South (never to reclaim them: When he returned to his storage locker a year later, he found it full of a stranger’s things; nobody could tell him what had become of his old sling chairs and bookcase and Bob Parker portrait). He lunched with Sam Lawrence and broke the news that he hadn’t finished the novel after all, but hoped to do so by Christmas “at the latest.” And finally, per the advice of Verlin Cassill, he bought a “snot-green” used car for the long rural backroads of Iowa. “Richard Yates?” said the man taking his order at the car-painting shop. “There’s a good writer who goes by that name.” As it happened, the car painter was himself an aspiring writer who took classes at the New School; the paint shop, he explained, was only a day job. Yates asked him to paint the car gray.